


Come Along With Me (the Time Flies remix)

by roachpatrol



Category: Doctor Who (1963), Doctor Who (2005), Doctor Who (Season 6B)
Genre: F/F, F/M, Multi
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2011-04-24
Updated: 2011-04-24
Packaged: 2017-10-18 14:49:45
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,825
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/190002
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/roachpatrol/pseuds/roachpatrol
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p><i>Let's be the thorn on the rose:<br/>Time flies, make a statement, strike a pose. </i></p><p>Martha will one day have been traveling with the Doctor again.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Come Along With Me (the Time Flies remix)

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Aris Merquoni (ArisTGD)](https://archiveofourown.org/users/ArisTGD/gifts).



> Remix of [ Of Course, Come Along ](http://archiveofourown.org/works/57279) by Aris Merquoni, for Remix Redux 9.

"No," she says, trying to wrestle her arm out of this new Doctor's grip, "no, no, _no!_ "

"You have to," he says, "I'm so sorry, Martha, but you _have_ to. It's going to happen soon, we're all going to be rounded up by the Time Lords and they can't know what you know about me, don't you see? _They can't know about the War_."

"No!" she screams again, kicking out at him, a blow that would have dislocated his knee had he been human but it doesn't, he just stumbles a bit and with that terrible, young, inhuman face he looks sorry, and enfolds her in his arms. He has a bowtie again, red and silky against her cheek, tied properly and not just fixed on with a bit of old safety pin.

She hates it.

"I'm sorry," he says, his accent different and different again but his wretched guilt just the same, "I'm so _sorry_ , Martha."

Everything goes calm and quiet and dark, and when she wakes up she is in lying on the couch in her mother's house.

"Was that him?" her mum asks, handing her some tea. "He's gotten young, these days."

"Yeah," she says bitterly. "That was him."

The she curls up and drags a pillow over her head, because she has done so many horrible things in her short life, she has loved and lost and loved and lost and loved, and so losing everything all over again still isn't enough to make cry in front of her mum.

*

She does the math, over and over, like a compulsion, the same nervous habit that makes parrots pull all their feathers off. It's 2007, she's twenty nine, five years or so older than when she'd left. Or is she? Twenty seven, thirty, time travel doesn't do any favors for the linearly inclined. Say she's twenty nine, just for convenience. Zoe is from the other side of the century, a generation that Martha's grandchildren might produce. Or is that too far? A generation is twenty years, roughly... or is it thirty?

It doesn't matter. Martha's not going to have more than fifty, sixty years left. People in her time don't often get more than eighty years, and her family isn't the longest-lived (her grandfather died at fifty two, her grandmother on the other side at sixty). Her mum's only fifty six and she's gray at the temples, her face lined and her movements slow and deliberate. If Martha's careful she might step into 2070 as an old, old woman, her hair white, her hands like bundles of knotted string, shaking in the breeze.

And she's not a careful sort of person, anymore.

*

She haunts her old bedroom like a vengeful ghost, sleeping poorly and eating worse. Her parents-- and isn't that funny, both of them, that they should have each other after everything, and isn't that petty that she should be so resentful-- leave tea and sympathy at the threshold of her doorway, and leave it at that. The years between Martha and everyone she loves stretch out like canyons, sickening and empty and so, so far to fall.

And then one day she drags herself out of bed to answer the door and is handed a letter by a young man-- so young, they're all too young these days-- in a red UNIT cap.

MARTHA JONES, it says on the front, in Zoe's crisp, block-printed letters.

"Oh god," she says, and sits down hard.

*

She cuts into the letter as if she's performing surgery, the scalpel gliding gently through the yellowed paper, her breath bottled up hot and burning in her lungs.  
 _  
Dear Martha,_ it reads, still in that dear handwriting, the careful, heavily-pressed-in letters of someone not used to ink pens, or paper.  
 _  
I am traveling in time with a man who calls himself the Doctor and a boy my age named Jamie, and we are in the 1960's right now. I hope this letter makes it to you alright: it is only ink and paper, but I have been assured that both mediums are sturdier than they at first appear, and that Lethbridge-Stuart is entirely reliable. Fifty years still seems a long time for a letter to travel, but I suppose you've been making do just fine all these years._  
 _  
Jamie is well, and the Doctor is, I suppose, as ever: difficult and sweet, and as mad as a cheese CPU. They send their best wishes to you, though in the interests of full disclosure I must admit that the none of us have met you yet._

 _The past is so strange, but so beautiful. It is easy to forget that one is a time traveler, if one only travels to places one hasn't been before, but it is such a different sensation when one is in_   
_London! I can hardly believe this is the same city I took school trips to as a child, but then we will turn a corner and there will be a statue looking just the same as ever... It is quite funny to see the pigeons sitting all over them as if they weren't important historical artifacts, though! In my time they've all been locked up safely in transluminum domes. The statues, I mean, not the pigeons (the pigeons remain, as ever, at liberty to perch wherever they can manage). Lethbridge-Stuart told me it was quite alright to touch any statue I could reach, though, he said they weren't going to break! It is as if everyone in this time both believes that everything is going to last forever and that nothing matters at all. Perhaps I shouldn't have, but I took him up on his offer. While we were out and about I went off and clasped the hand of Peter Pan where he stood free in his gardens. His hand was as cool and smooth as the Doctor's always is, if rather less soft._   
_  
If I ever go home, I think I shall pass that statue with a certain possessiveness: he has not been touched since his dome went up, but I will remember the feel of his hand, a cool and smooth-worn little secret just between the two of us. And you too: you live in a time where one can still shake the hand of statues, if one dares to look a trifle silly climbing up to say hello!_

 _The past is a complicated place: I suppose you know that even better than I. But I take heart in the thought that one day we will meet, and all of our wondering will resolve. You have always spoken to me, and of our time together, fondly, and it is with likewise fondness that I close this letter. Be well, Martha Jones, until we can all finally be together. You are a wonderful person, I believe, and your letters have always made me happy, and happy, too, am I to finally get this chance to return one._

 _I am and shall remain,_

 _Your Zoe._

She realizes she's crying when a tear hits the ancient paper, turning the cream to a harsh mustard yellow as it soaks in. She jerks back and scrubs angrily at her eyes, before blotting the letter carefully with her sleeve.

She didn't think of this. Why didn't she think of this? Zoe and Jamie had had lives before she'd come aboard, had had adventures. She thinks of the 60's, miniskirts and long hours in the shop and nasty small-minded little people that couldn't see past the color of her skin, the Doctor-- her Doctor, her first-- pacing restlessly about their tiny flat like a caged tiger, all frustrated power and stupid gizmos that set off the fire alarms. That 60's. She hadn't known Zoe then.

Oh, _Zoe._

"What's wrong, love?" her mother asks, sitting down on the couch beside her.

"Nothing," she says, and scrubs hard at her eyes. The tears keep coming and she sets the letter aside and puts her head on her mother's chest as she hasn't done since she was a little girl and her parents were in love for the first time.

"Oh, Martha," her mother says, and folds her arms around her. "Oh, my bravest girl, there. There there, now."

*  
She gets her own flat, a cramped little thing only one Tube stop away from the secret U.N.I.T headquarters. She paints the walls a sharp sweet gray, lays down bright shag rugs all what little floorspace is available, and pins up a postcard of Peter Pan to the tiny icebox in the kitchenette.

Then she puts on her sharpest business suit, her tallest heels, and her best make-up.

"Martha Jones," the U.N.I.T receptionist says as she comes in to their dummy office. "We've been expecting you."

"Then you should probably salute," Martha says, and walks right past.

*

She buys a pack of stationary, cream paper and pale blue envelopes fitted precisely to each other's relative dimensions, a little booklet of stamps with the queen in gold ink. She puts her return address on each letter, underneath a date, because if there's one thing she's good at now it's keeping a sharp eye and a steady hand on Time. It's a gulf of fifty years, sixty, seventy, to young Zoe.

And it's a short skip in a little blue box back.

November 13, she writes, 2007, the words pouring out of her like acid rain, cramping her hands and the back of her neck and her handwriting's always been shit but she feels better, after each letter, she feels a little cleaner and clearer each time. _Dear Zoe,_ she writes, _I've been working with a handsome man, a pediatrician of all things, he asked me out and all I could think of was the way you would smile when you won an argument--_

February 20, 2008, _his name is Tom he saved me once in a different universe, he wants to marry me in this one and I miss you--_

April 20, 2008, _I said yes._

April 28 2008, _called the Doctor back to London check out this fishy car technology that's been going around, you won't believe it but there's a life or two of his that will actually come when called, who'd have thought? I'd tell you to wish me luck but you were probably never young enough to believe in illogical things like luck, so wish me favorable possibilites, love_ \--  
 _  
May 11 2008, Tom's dead, the Sontarans got him I didn't know I didn't even think to warn him he doesn't have ATMOS in his car he was in a friend the friend's dead too and I was off screwing around in space with the ~~goddamn~~ Doctor when they were notifying the next of kin, when they said we're sorry for your loss all I could think of was which one which ~~fucking~~ one I'm sorry I'm so sorry I shouldn't be writing this kind of stuff to you maybe you're just some little girl when you're reading this but dear lord how I wish this would stop happening to me_ \--

June 28, 2008, _I don't know what to do any more_ _I'm so tired, Zoe, I'm so bloody tired._

She sends them all, even the ones she regrets the moment her pen touches the paper. Who knows? Who really knows? Maybe every stupid letter with too much information and not enough punctuation is the key to creating some fundamental part of the girl that she'd later fall in love with. Maybe each letter was vital to the fabric of space time. Maybe the letters were just going to get lost when the post office box she's renting out is eaten by a miniature black hole.  It doesn't matter: what's done is done is done, and if you learn nothing else from the Doctor than by god do you learn that.

And late at night when she's got nothing but half a bottle of red wine and a fresh sheet of paper, it makes he feel just a little better to think that Zoe knew each every maudlin corner of her right from the very first moment and fell in love with her anyway.

*  
July 10, 2008:  
 _  
I met someone. His name is Micky Smith and he's ~~broken like me~~ a good man. He's fought Daleks and Cybermen and Sontarans and lost so many people he can only love ghosts. We're partners, freelancers, and it's going well. Torchwood helps us out with funding, but don't tell the Doctor that._

 _Are you out there in the future with these tired eyes and gun calluses on your beautiful hands, Zoe? If you are don't tell me, I couldn't stand it. Damn the Doctor for doing this to us all, and damn me for letting him. ~~We mortals only get one heart and there's only so many pieces and when you give too many of them away~~_

 _Be well, Zoe._

 _Yours for always,  
Martha Jones. _

*

She and Mickey get married because it seems like a good idea: he's a man and she's a woman in a time where that means something, they're both partners in a career that spends a great deal of time sitting around in hospitals, listening to the soft chirrups of heart monitors, and Torchwood credit stretches thin in America. U.N.I.T credit even more so.

"This is bollocks," she says to Mickey when he finally limps unhappily up to her bedside. Her head is throbbing and everything feels too quiet, far away. "How long did it take this time?"

"Three hours, two phone calls," Mickey says, levering himself awkwardly into the hard-won visitor's chair. "We're taking the first flight back to NHS once we can get you clear."

"You should change your name to Jones, we could be siblings. Siblings can visit each other in hospital whenever they want, can't they?"

"Yeah, but I've seen your siblings, mate. No thanks."

"Well, then I could change my name to--" and she hesitates, and he does too. The air between them is thick with ghosts.

"I'd let you keep your name," Mickey says gently. "Already enough Smiths in the world for me."

And maybe it's just the morphine but, "Let's do it," she says. "No. No. Yes, I mean. Let's get married. We might as well."

"We're already in Vegas," Mickey agrees. Maybe it's the morphine, but he looks as if she's made him happy. She didn't know anything could do that anymore.

He takes her hand, mindful of the I.Vs, and she hadn't thought anything could have made her happy any more, either.

*  
 _  
My Dear Zoe:_

 _I just got married again. Second time on Earth, though I think the fifth or sixth time at all. Second best for the both of us, me and my poor Mickey Smith, but it seemed like a good time idea. We got married in a job lot by a man dressed up like Elvis. No idea who anyone else was, this big crowd of strangers all saying I Do and pairing off with each other in their own private little twosomes._

 _Remember the planet where we all had to get married because we'd trespassed in the sacred grove? Ploosh, I think it was. The Planet. I don't remember the name of the grove, I can't remember everything as clearly as I used to. Too many blows to the head and they start to knock everything else out-- perhaps that's why the Doctor is so flighty. You and Jamie wore red flowers in your hair and I had white. What did the Doctor wear? Yellow? Red, too? I only remember him in that awful coat of his, like a little black duck, waddling along arm in arm with the two of you in your bright gowns, so young and beautiful.  
 ~~  
I hope you remember. The idea that I'm sending these letters to some little girl~~_

 _  
~~never mind. I suppose I had too much to drink. Shouldn't be writing this at all but I just thought of you and wished~~   
_

_to hell with it, I'm going to send this letter, too. You should know all of me, even the bits that get drunk and write silly things to her ~~beautiful~~ ~~lost~~ beautiful girl in the future._

 _I hope you're well, Zoe, even if you're little. Especially if you're little. Always marry for love, Zoe, promise me that. _

_Yours for always,  
Martha. _

*

She ducks into an alley for cover and registers that the bins she's crouching behind are likewise sheltering one Zoe Heriot a bare second before she's got her arms around the girl.

"Zoe, oh my god," she murmurs, scatting kisses across her cheeks, her button nose, her soft mouth, "Oh my god oh my god it's _you_ what are you _doing here!?_ "

"Hiding from an angry Rithpa," Zoe laughs, turning her head to one side, letting Martha kiss her ear, her neck, "I thought I told you and Jamie to-- to--"

She draws back a little, and reaches up to tug on one of Martha's braids.

"It's you," Zoe says slowly.

"Yeah," Martha says, kissing her again, but she pulls away.

"No," she says gently, "I mean, really _you_. You're the one that sent me letters."

"You always knew, didn't you?" Martha asks, laughing through the tears in her throat. "All the time I was traveling with you you knew--"

"Oh, _Martha_ ," Zoe says, and burrows back into her embrace. 

Martha holds on tightly, tears clawing their way out from under her lashes and the seconds clawing away at her chest and it's not fair it's not bloody _fair._ Some girls get steady careers and husbands that work nine to five, and Martha gets causal loops of loss ten years-- a hundred years-- wide wrapped up in the bow of Zoe's lips against her cheek, kissing gently at her tears.

Her heartbreak has been written into the warp and weft of all of space and time and all she has are a few minutes to hold this brilliant, beautiful girl close to her in a filthy alley, grit digging into her knees and screaming in the distance and it's just... it's just not _fucking_ fair.

"When I go," Martha says into Zoe's hair, quickly, desperate to confess, "I didn't want to. I had to. I'd never want to."

"I know," Zoe says.

"I'm so sorry," Martha says. "I wouldn't have, if I could--"

"I know," Zoe says again, kisses the very tip of her nose, and pushes her away.

It feels almost exactly like dying.

"Go on," Zoe tells her. "You have to go, remember? You're coming."

"Zoe, are you there?" The Martha that hasn't lost her yet calls out from around the corner, her voice a strange too-high sound, like a recording. Martha remembers this, remembers the Rithpa and the way Zoe had kissed her later that evening after they'd saved the world, led her by the wrist into a spare bedroom and her eyes had been so wide and sweet and her lips had been even sweeter--

"Coming, Martha!" Zoe calls back, and gives her a final warning glance.

Martha puts her hand to her mouth to bottle in the screaming, and runs.

*  
Sontarans again and who should swoop in and save them but her Doctor, her first one, all pinstripes and badly hidden pain. She and Mickey could have managed on their own but that's not really the way of this Doctor of hers, never one to leave anything alone if he can help it, and she looks up and he looks down and she _knows_. He looks so old, with that smooth narrow face of his, so unbelievably ancient and she thinks of the young boy with the perfect bowtie and that exact same grieving pain in his eyes.

She thinks _'He's dying and he's scared'_

And _'I could tell him it's going to be alright'_

And _'I could tell him to go fuck himself'_

But neither of them would be true enough to bother. She presses her face to Mickey's chest and eventually the Doctor goes off to whatever it is he does when he's not breaking everything he touches.

*

The TARDIS comes back.

She and Mickey are on her sofa, kneading the kinks from each other's feet after a long day's stake-out, and the bloody TARDIS bloody well _comes back_ and she sits straight up with all the air sucked right out of her because it's _his_ TARDIS, her second Doctor's rattletrap peeled-paint wreck of a machine and she knows those scratches like she knows the scars on the back of her hands. She _knows._

"I have to go," she gasps, and it's almost a question after this long: _I have to go?_

"I'm sorry," she says, "I'm so sorry."

"It's fine," Mickey says. He squeezes her foot a final time, and lifts it gently off his lap. "I always knew you would, if you could."

"Mickey--"

"It's why you married me," Mickey says. "Why I married you. We were always leftovers, weren't we, love?" His smile hurts to see, probably hurts to wear.

"Find someone," she orders him, her fingers tight around his battered toes. "Find someone real. Don't be alone. I want you to be al--"

"I'm fine," he says, smiling, another lost boy who has learned how to lie. "I'm alright. I'm always alright."

She leans across the space between them and kisses him, quick and hard and sorry-- so sorry-- and then she's running, her feet still bare and the throbbing purr of the TARDIS going right up through them the first step past the threshold.

There's the console room, the coat rack a dark line against the whiteness and the little hex-nut of a console and the young Doctor in his big floppy coat and Jamie turning to greet her-- he's old, now, thirty, perhaps, and he smiles like a little boy when he sees her, and bounds around the console like a puppy.

"Zoe?" she asks, her heart in her throat. "Is she--?"

"We're just goin' to pick her up," Jamie says. "We thought we'd stop by on the way and see if you'd like to come along."

She crushes him in a hug-- he's gotten so broad, filled out sturdy as an ox-- and he laughs an older version of that sweet laugh of his, and picks her off her feet, swinging her around in giddy circles.

This Doctor is older, now, his black hair shot through with silver and a new map of creases laid over the old one, but it's a smaller change than some of those that she's seen, and this new gray dignity suits him well. He tuts at their wild abandon and strokes the dials of his machine with that particular gentle fondness-- 

"Come along," he murmurs, and his voice hits her in the heart and _sings_ just the same way as always. "Yes, come along."


End file.
